Sound Recording - the WellMixed.com Blog

The blog has not been well-tended recently, but now it will be even less so, as the WellMixedStore.com takes over the NavBar link on the main website.

However, this means the beginning of a new era, where the microphones that you want to listen to are available at WellMixedStore.com

News about all thing related to home recording will be more constantly posted on a little microblogging platform that you may have heard about called Twitter. Be sure to Follow @WellMixed there.

Douglas Wolk contributed this piece to NPR.org’s Monitor Mix blog earlier this week. It is a concise discussion about the pros and cons of polishing recordings to death.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2009/11/the_death_of_mistakes_means_th.html

One gem of the piece is this YouTube Video, that provides a great explanation of the “loudness wars” in mastering:

My major criticism of Wolk’s writing here is that his prime example of a sloppy recording, The Beatles “Rain,” is not really THAT sloppy. In fact it uses some well thought out reverse tape effects. The Beatles - with the help of George Martin - were very into forward thinking recording techniques.

Also, left out of the discussion is the ways in which most people listen to music versus the ways in which audiophiles listen to music, AND the ways in which record companies sell music and who is buying it.

Of course WellMixed does whatever the client wants, so we don’t have to be bothered with all of these aesthetic conundrums. But…. Sometimes it’s fun to think about!

What do you think? Please leave a comment!!

Trent Reznor seems to be getting a lot of play on this blog, but perhaps that’s because the guy is so forward thinking about the music industry and likes to talk about it.

Reznor’s band, Nine Inch Nails, is on their “final” American tour this summer. They were through Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, and I scored a backstage pass.

We had a short Q&A session with Trent, during which he said, “[bands] can’t making money on record labels any more. Or if they do get paid, they have to sue the label.”

WellMixed was started because I had observed that artists are often just as well financially on their own without a label. Trent’s statement re-enforced that idea, and I did a quick Google search to see how many artists were suing their labels to get paid for their art. Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Smashing Pumpkins, Hawthorne Heights, The Allman Brothers, and Bay City Rollers were all in the first couple pages of results.

(more…)

I recently ran across a New York Times bio piece, written just over a year ago, on Rick Rubin. There are two great reasons to read this article, if you haven’t already.

One is the writer’s take on the music industry as Rubin assumed a presidential role at Columbia Records. The other is Rubin’s personal quotes about how he approaches music production.

The writer mentions a study that Columbia records did during the summer of ‘07, and reports:

” a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over … Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth.”

It goes on to follow Rubin as he tries to make sense of the situation. While his co-executives seem to be sitting on the sidelines, Rubin begins arguing for a subscription model.

The subscription model seems to be the right path for the Major Labels. If you look at the success for Rhapsody, one must wonder why the big players can’t build a platform that beats Rhapsody. Or… buy Rhapsody and lock it down. It would provide them with a predictable revenue stream on which to, you know.. base a business.

Then again, Columbia’s website looks like the results of a freshman year HTML class. (…and somewhere a designer is crying…..) Also, getting the Majors to work on a project together is most likely a legal nightmare. At least they’d have money to pay the lawyers.

Anyhow, the article also goes on to talk about the philosophy of how Rubin makes records. He says:

“I have no training, no technical skill — it’s only this ability to listen and try to coach the artist to be the best they can from the perspective of a fan.

“I do not know how to work a board. I don’t turn knobs. I have no technical ability whatsoever. But I’m there when they need me to be there. My primary asset is I know when I like something or not. It always comes down to taste.”

Even though the last Rubin-produced Metallica album was hard to listen to due to the mastering (or mixing depending on who you ask), Rubin got the best songs out of the group since Bob Rock’s Black Album. This seems to proves that regardless of the recording technology, what really matters is still the ears. Trust them.

The NY Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html

Mix Magazine Interview with Rubin:
http://www.digitalprosound.com/Features/Interviews-Discuss/RickRubin.htm

		I’m far from being the world’s greatest vocalist, a brilliant guitarist or a drummer of ANY sort. [Hell boy, if you were any place close, you'd be sittin' sippin' Martini's in Martinique!]
Hmmm! Nor do I pretend to be brilliant at recording my music. [Boy, whatcha doin' writin' this stuff if you don't know nothin' about it?] But these days, you don’t have to be any of those things and you can still make music and get it heard by other people - and for most of us, THAT’s the point. If you’re lazy, though, what folks get to hear may not be what you imagined your music would sound like, nor how you’d like it to sound.

When Brian Wilson captured the amazing sounds that make up “Good Vibrations” for what many regard as The Beach Boys’ finest song and a pop music classic, he didn’t have a DAW - a Cubase, or Logic or Garageband or any one of dozens of other brands.

So when he recorded those astonishingly clear harmonies, those strange sounds, he used tape - 90 hours worth of tape actually - and it took six months, four studios and 20 versions before he was done.

What makes the clarity of the recording remarkable (the way you can hear every voice clearly, every instrument is defined, every drum beat is crystal clear) is that the original is a mono recording!
[Boy, I always told you this stereo nonsense will NEVER catch on!]

While I’m not suggesting any of us could create such a masterpiece, we get into the studio and try to create our own, and the process is very different!  We fire up the PC/Mac and lay down the music and vocals.  Our software makes the process so easy, many of us (I’m as guilty as the next man) are lured into laziness.  We develop bad recording habits and we don’t take the care we should.

We don’t necessarily worry if the vocals are a touch muddy and a little off key. It needn’t “matter” if the drums sound dull and lifeless or if that distorted overdriven guitar drowns everything else out.

It doesn’t matter much because we can “fix it in the mix“.

It’s that phrase - “fix it in the mix” - which dogs most recording these days, and it angers me.
[Steady boy: take five.]

Don’t get me wrong: Wilson spent months mixing, remixing, re-recording and mixing again to get “Good Vibrations” just right.  The difference was what they started with in those days - what they captured on tape was the final sound!
[Boy, you're making no sense at all.]

Back then the vocals were probably compressed before they were committed to tape to avoid unwanted transients and almost certainly EQ’d on the way to the tape as well! Today, we record them dry. Some producers put a little reverb on the singer’s monitor loop just so they get the “feel” of it for their performance’s sake. But it’s unlikely to be the reverb/delay which will be used when they “fix it in the mix“.

Guitars in the sixties were amped up and recorded with the distortion, drive, wah - whatever - committed to tape. Today, you can record the raw strings sound direct while using amp simulation on the monitor loop so the layer gets the right feel. But you likely use onboard amp models to shape the final sound. And so it goes on.

And back then, a bum note was a bum note and some wasted tape. It had to be redone. A missed word in a vocal meant re-recording the vocal. The same for a harmony.   (My brother’s favoprite phrase when we got close to a good take in the early days was hugely insulting to a certain group of musicians. “It is, ” he would say, “close enough for folk.”)

That’s NOT true today. Slightly off key vocals can be corrected “in the box”. A missed word can be edited out and replaced by a good take: it CAN all be “put right in the mix”.

I said I was as guilty as the next man.

The long note circled in the picture (I run Samplitude right now) appears as the back end of one word about five times in the song. I did dozens of takes but hit the note right about twice and got the timing right no more than half-a-dozen times. I “fixed it in the mix”, using a good take to replace the end of all the bad ones.

My point is this: if you start out with the attitude that it can all be “put right in the mix” and so let laziness take over, the final mix may not be what you expected. One reason is you’ll be leaving the mixing team (even if that’s you) with less time, and less inclination, to polish and enhance your work.

And it is my contention that adding compression, or reverb - or editing a track - should all be done only to IMPROVE the song.  Mixing should be an improving and enhancing process, NOT a repair job!

If you, or the mixing engineer get weighed down by complex edits, heavy duty pitch correction, desperate compression and reverb to save a flawed vocal, the desire to THEN improve the recording WILL be diminished.

Sop, for lazy, read lousy and for mixing, read added magic.

I don’t have all the answers, but next week, I’ll be explaining how I try to minimise turning the mixing process into an all out repair job!

[You finished boy? I want a beer!]

[P.S. Apologies for the interruptions. Grandpa says we should all record on wire machines from the early 1900s.]